1.8.2-Columbina
Brick!Club 1.8.2 Fantine Happy WOW I GOT A BIT CARRIED AWAY WITH HALF-THOUGHT OUT FANTINE FEELS SORRY. Or, the chapter that makes me really angry at Valjean for not getting Cosette. Also, let’s remember that all these lies that everyone has to tell Fantine basically started with Sister Simplice and her no-lying policy. If she had just told Fantine that the mayor was busy with an important meeting or somesuch, we wouldn’t be having this problem now. (Although we would possibly have Fantine feeling that she doesn’t matter to him after all, etc etc.) (Hey, Valjean, maybe if you had just gone and gotten the kid two months ago everything would be relatively dandy now.) She was making a visible effort to be calm and “very good,” as she expressed it in the feebleness of illness which resembles infancy, in order that, seeing her so peaceable, they might make no difficulty about bringing Cosette to her. This passage, and all of infantile in her illness Fantine, has been making me super uncomfortable, even though I know that that’s exactly how I get when I’m sick, how everyone gets when they’re sick, just look at how tough guys need to be coddled when they get manflu. But once Hugo starts throwing in all this femininity and virginity and holiness stuff in with this infantile feebleness, all of the alarm bells start ringing. And yet, it fits perfectly with what’s become my headcanon for Fantine, in a way that is both heartbreaking and even more uncomfortable still. I figure that running around M. sur M. as a child, Fantine must have learnt to survive by being charming in a little-girl way, to be heartbreakingly darling by picking flowers while dressed in rags, that sort of thing (can’t you just imagine dirty little rag-clad Fantine excitedly showing a shopkeeper her bouquet of wildflowers and pretending to be a beautiful bride walking down the aisle?) - not consciously, Fantine obviously isn’t consciously performing her femininity to get what she wants the way her “friends” in Paris did, but she has learnt that being sweet and innocent and “a good little girl” means that people will look after her. And that’s still what she was doing in Paris, being a good girl, believing and trusting everyone, doing as she was told by Tholomyes, earning the scorn of other girls who thought it must be an act, so over the top was her innocent obedience. Then, more and more this innocent obedience stops working for her - she’s still playing by the rules she learnt on her rural streets, to be sweet, to be pretty, to behave, but no one else is playing by those rules. Then she gets angry and bitter because she’s realising that all the rules she learnt were wrong, that it’s the playing by the rules that got her into this mess. But now that she’s back in a position of dependence, those rules do apply again. She is sweet and innocent and obedient and does her best to be a “good girl” and all the sisters love her for it. She’s chastised, or she thinks she is, for any flares of temper, or pretty much any emotions not befitting a good little girl. She apologises, and blames these outbursts on her misfortunes, that she “doesn’t know what she’s saying”, it’s almost kind of Jekyll and Hyde-y, that she is, in essence, a good girl, but her suffering has given her this split personality. And that makes me super uncomfortable because I feel like she’s taken a backwards step as a character - it’s not like Valjean, where he turned understandably angry and bitter and then had that challenged and had to re-evaluate his world view and grow as a person. Fantine turns understandably angry and bitter and then is plucked out of her suffering and goes back to square one and then dies. I mean, I love Disney Princesses, I am all for innocent good girls, okay? But the rules that Fantine had learnt were not good rules, and she should have learnt that. She shouldn’t have been sent back to square one. It’s fairly rage-inducing too, because we still give girls these kind of rules as they’re growing up and being “good girls” - to be sexy but not sexual, to not lead boys on but not to be rude, don’t be a slut but don’t be a prude - a girl can still try to follow the rules as closely as Fantine did and end up in just as much trouble. And those rules are never condemned, in fact, Fantine is praised by the text for going back to following the rules once she’s in hospital. Also, I’ve been wavering back and forth, trying to decide how much Fantine suspects the abuse Cosette has been subjected to - I mean, once the letters turned nasty and threatening, surely she’d realise that they may not have Cosette’s best interests at heart. But this kind of clears that up: “And did she have white linen? Did those Thenardiers keep her clean? How have they fed her? Oh! if you only knew how I have suffered, putting such questions as that to myself during all the time of my wretchedness. ” So, she suspected. At the very least. And when she was putting such questions to herself, she would have known that she was the one who left Cosette with them, that her judgement had failed her again, and she’d start to question whether it was just her judgement or if there truly were no good people in the world, at least until Madeleine showed her kindness. Sister Simplice is there for this exchange - what does she think of Madeleine’s blatant lies? Last chapter she said that “we” must not tell a lie, and I assumed that specifically meant both her and Valjean, not some kind of all-of-humanity-encompassing we. So what does she think of this turn of events? Oh, also, Fantine’s vision - at first it seems like a relatively legit vision of Valjean the night before, as those sort of visions go, with him being surrounded by glory as he does The Right Thing. But then again, “All night long I have seen white things, and persons who smiled at me. ” So were these visions of simultaneously happening events, or of her future in heaven? Or two separate visions? Commentary Doeskin-pantaloons I never got the feeling that Fantine was being praised by the text for going back to square one, as it were. I more thought her going back to square one - fluctuating from desperate mother to sweet innocent girl - was part of her delirium and her desperation to get Cosette back. From your interpretation: she’s trying everything she can think of to persuade people to give her Cosette, including the rules that she learnt as a child.I think it’s a sign of tragedy that she’s trying so hard, that she thinks that by being good and obedient she can fix this, rather than a congratulation of her performance of femininity.